OpenAI's Internal Culture Warning Open Letter

Another warning about people who work at OpenAI or formerly did in June, 2024

Hello Everyone,

I’m on a semi-break so there may be less frequency than normal on this Newsletter in June. I was a bit alarmed by a new internal report by some people who work at OpenAI.

Current and former OpenAI employees published an open letter describing concerns about the artificial intelligence industry’s rapid advancement:

OpenAI’s culture had been called secretive but this is yet another take on it being a reckless culture.

The threats former employees were subject to is also highly concerning. OpenAI has next level NDA, and if they (former employees) refused to sign in relatively short order, they were reportedly threatened with the loss of their vested equity in the company — a severe provision that's fairly uncommon in Silicon Valley. That’s a pretty toxic practice.

A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence

• “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight,” the employees wrote.

• A group of current and former employees say the company has been reckless — but aren’t offering many details, according to Platformer.

• The current and former employees wrote that AI companies have “substantial non-public information” about what their technology can do, the extent of the safety measures they’ve put in place and the risk levels that technology has for different types of harm.

This is very concerning, what might those capabilities be?

Amid an exodus of Superintelligence researchers and AI safety experts from OpenAI, it does seem like corporation interests have substantially changed the makeup of OpenAI under the helm of Sam Altman.

Here is the entire Open Letter in full: